Posted on 01/03/2011 10:40:41 AM PST by RnMomof7
On January 3, 1521, Pope Leo X issues the papal bull Decet Romanum Pontificem, which excommunicates Martin Luther from the Catholic Church.
Martin Luther, the chief catalyst of Protestantism, was a professor of biblical interpretation at the University of Wittenberg in Germany when he drew up his 95 theses condemning the Catholic Church for its corrupt practice of selling indulgences, or the forgiveness of sins. He followed up the revolutionary work with equally controversial and groundbreaking theological works, and his fiery words set off religious reformers all across Europe.
In January 1521, Pope Leo X excommunicated Luther. Three months later, Luther was called to defend his beliefs before Holy Roman Emperor Charles V at the Diet of Worms, where he was famously defiant. For his refusal to recant his writings, the emperor declared him an outlaw and a heretic. Luther was protected by powerful German princes, however, and by his death in 1546, the course of Western civilization had been significantly altered.
Happy excommunication day!
I am SO very thankful that the JUDGE is the Almighty PERFECT Heavenly Father and not a bunch of high collared robes. I think there will be a host of very distraught people when they return to the Maker and maybe find old Luther not roasting on a hot bed of coals.
Party like it’s 1521?
LOL....ok. Happy Excommunication Day!
Don’t think we wouldn’t find something to celebrate about it either. ;)
I, for one, hope and pray that the old heretic managed to repent before he croaked. I don't wish Hell on anyone. Thus, I also hope and pray that his modern day followers will abandon their errors.
Faith alone, Grace alone, Scripture alone.
Probably the same person who defended the Spanish Inquisition -— you know, because the Spanish Jews were forced to convert at the tip of the sword (or be thrown into the ocean), they had better be good Roman Catholics.
Erasmus, the tidy-minded scholar and wit, had already sniggered at the Church's folly, but Luther's laughter had a prophetic ferocity about it. He had been shocked into realising that the Holy Father in Rome was in fact an agent of Antichrist. How could the Pope be anything else, demanded Luther, when he ordered silence on a loyal son of the Church who had rediscovered the most important truth about the human condition?This was the truth found in Scripture, especially in the urgent words of Paul of Tarsus to the Romans and Galatians: we humans are so trapped in sin - tangled up in ourselves - that nothing we do merits God's love. A loving judge, God wills to choose some of us out of this doomed, undeserving rabble, to receive his gift of saving grace: then we may enter his presence for ever as his children, saved by faith in the crucified Jesus Christ. In Reformation jargon, that is justification by faith through grace: it is the heart of Reformation Protestantism.
It was a hand-grenade lobbed into the medieval Western Church, levelling all the corridors past death into heaven so artfully constructed by medieval Catholic theologians. Their modern Catholic successors mostly agree that Luther was true to tradition in this matter, and Rome no longer officially classes him as a heretic. Small consolation for Pope Leo X and his immediate successors, who failed to shut Luther up, and struggled with the collapse of united Western Christendom.
-- from the thread The man who dared to laugh at the Pope ["Out of the Storm: The Life and Legacy of Martin Luther"]
Using Scripture alone... can you defend "Scripture alone"?
Hear this wail of distress from no less a man than the Lutheran theologian who, in the early part of the last century, compiled the Reformer’s works in five large volumes. De Wette says:
“The dissolution of the Protestant church is inevitable; her framework is so thoroughly rotten that no further patching will avail. The whole structure of evangelical religion is shattered, and few look with sympathy on its tottering fall. Within the compass of a square mile you hear four, five, six different gospels. The people, believe me, mark it will; they speak most contemptuously of their teachers, whom they regard either as blockheads or knaves, in teaching these opposite doctrines...growing immorality, a consequence of contempt for religion, concurs also as a cause to its deeper downfall. ...Oh Protestantism! has it, then, at last come to this with thee, that thy disciples protest against all religion? Facts, which are before the eyes of the whole world, declare aloud that this signification of thy name is no idle play upon words.”
And we pray for your soul and your eventual enlightenment as well, Brother in Christ.
***Probably the same person who defended the Spanish Inquisition -— ***
A love hate relationship. Bad because it forced jews to convert, good because it forced Moslems to convert. and 100 years later they forced unconverted moslems out of Spain.
"In the Pope, we don't hope!"
“Happy” and a respect for John 17:20-23 may have a difficult time co-existing.
And for that, at least, I thank you.
Martin Luther is to the RCC as Sarah Palin is to the liberal/elitist Establishment.
Discuss.
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